Global warming or not?

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

..

Global Warming theories pick and choose what facts they want, leaving out lots of other facts because they don't fit the "theory". Then they claim to "prove" Global warming with the remaining facts and ignore any facts that disagree with their theory. If I may quote....



....

What I get is the following.

Humans add CO2 to atmosphere.
CO2 causes greenhouse effect.
Temperature went up.

Case closed. Kill civilization to stop CO2 being generated.

...

Well maybe you're not following completely then. Again I suggest if you have a foolproof way to discredit/disprove the current leading theories, please get in touch with the climate scientists, I'm sure they will listen and work with you determine if your valid evidence has or has not been accounted for.

That's the way science works.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by Vector

There is no absolutely certain knowledge of anything, not even mathematical propositions. It may be that two and two do not add up to four. It just seems that way to us because we are all hopelessly insane.

People determined to deny the undeniable may place an impossible burden of proof on those who assert what they wish to deny. Disprove any possible alternative, no matter how speculative, to what you claim is true.

Those of us who claim that global warming is anthropogenic cannot prove, as a matter of absolute certainty, that it is not due to sunspots. No one can prove or disprove anything as a matter of absolute certainty. We cannot prove that global warming is not caused by astrological influences, or by the exercise of psychic powers by malicious extraterrestrials.

The case for anthropogenic global warming is not based on speculation. It is based on established science and solid empirical data. Attributing global warming to sunspots is pure speculation. It is not reasonable to reject solid science based on pure speculation.

...

What solid science? Question - what cause the Medieval Warm-up and then caused the Little Ice Age? Answer - we don't know. Did whatever caused them go away? Highly unlikely. So, which way are the underlying non-anthropogenic trends going? Beats me, but if you don't know that, how can you add or subtract their effect from the measurable change over the last century or two? You can't. If we had two or three millennia of date to work with, covering at least some of the smaller cycles, we could. But we don't have that data! All we have is 50 years of highly detail data, 350 years of less and less detailed data, and extremely limited, second hand data going back a few millennia. And I say for the record, that's not enough to have any sort of solid science out of, in a subject where you can't run a separate experiment on, over and over to get more data...

[RedHeadPeter]

'borrowed' from The Guardian website:

"From: ernst.kattweizel@redcar.ac.uk

Sent: 29 October 2009

To: The Knights Carbonic

Gentlemen, the culmination of our great plan approaches fast. What the Master called "the ordering of men's affairs by a transcendent world state, ordained by God and answerable to no man", which we now know as Communist World Government, advances towards its climax at Copenhagen. For 185 years since the Master, known to the laity as Joseph Fourier, launched his scheme for world domination, the entire physical science community has been working towards this moment.

The early phases of the plan worked magnificently. First the Master's initial thesis – that the release of infrared radiation is delayed by the atmosphere – had to be accepted by the scientific establishment. I will not bother you with details of the gold paid, the threats made and the blood spilt to achieve this end. But the result was the elimination of the naysayers and the disgrace or incarceration of the Master's rivals. Within 35 years the 3rd Warden of the Grand Temple of the Knights Carbonic (our revered prophet John Tyndall) was able to "demonstrate" the Master's thesis. Our control of physical science was by then so tight that no major objections were sustained.

More resistance was encountered (and swiftly dispatched) when we sought to install the 6th Warden (Svante Arrhenius) first as professor of physics at Stockholm University, then as rector. From this position he was able to project the Master's second grand law – that the infrared radiation trapped in a planet's atmosphere increases in line with the quantity of carbon dioxide the atmosphere contains. He and his followers (led by the Junior Warden Max Planck) were then able to adapt the entire canon of physical and chemical science to sustain the second law.

Then began the most hazardous task of all: our attempt to control the instrumental record. Securing the consent of the scientific establishment was a simple matter. But thermometers had by then become widely available, and amateur meteorologists were making their own readings. We needed to show a steady rise as industrialisation proceeded, but some of these unfortunates had other ideas. The global co-option of police and coroners required unprecedented resources, but so far we have been able to cover our tracks.

The over-enthusiasm of certain of the Knights Carbonic in 1998 was most regrettable. The high reading in that year has proved impossibly costly to sustain. Those of our enemies who have yet to be silenced maintain that the lower temperatures after that date provide evidence of global cooling, even though we have ensured that eight of the 10 warmest years since 1850 have occurred since 2001. From now on we will engineer a smoother progression.

Our co-option of the physical world has been just as successful. The thinning of the Arctic ice cap was a masterstroke. The ring of secret nuclear power stations around the Arctic circle, attached to giant immersion heaters, remains undetected, as do the space-based lasers dissolving the world's glaciers.

Altering the migratory and reproductive patterns of the world's wildlife has proved more challenging. Though we have now asserted control over the world's biologists, there is no accounting for the unauthorised observations of farmers, gardeners, birdwatchers and other troublemakers. We have therefore been forced to drive migrating birds, fish and insects into higher latitudes, and to release several million tonnes of plant pheromones every year to accelerate flowering and fruiting. None of this is cheap, and ever more public money, secretly diverted from national accounts by compliant governments, is required to sustain it.

The co-operation of these governments requires unflagging effort. The capture of George W Bush, a late convert to the cause of Communist World Government, was made possible only by the threatened release of footage filmed by a knight at Yale, showing the future president engaged in coitus with a Ford Mustang. Most ostensibly capitalist governments remain apprised of where their real interests lie, though I note with disappointment that we have so far failed to eliminate Vaclav Klaus. Through the offices of compliant states, the Master's third grand law has been established: world government will be established under the guise of controlling man-made emissions of greenhouse gases.

Keeping the scientific community in line remains a challenge. The national academies are becoming ever more querulous and greedy, and require higher pay-offs each year. The inexplicable events of the past month, in which the windows of all the leading scientific institutions were broken and a horse's head turned up in James Hansen's bed, appear to have staved off the immediate crisis, but for how much longer can we maintain the consensus? Knights Carbonic, now that the hour of our triumph is at hand, I urge you all to redouble your efforts. In the name of the Master, go forth and terrify.

Professor Ernst Kattweizel, University of Redcar. 21st Grand Warden of the Temple of the Knights Carbonic.

This is the kind of conspiracy the deniers need to reveal to show that man-made climate change is a con. The hacked emails are a hard knock, but the science of global warming withstands much more than that."

[kennyc]

Here! Here! Karma worthy!

Thanks for the update RHP!

[Angst]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

What solid science? Question - what cause the Medieval Warm-up and then caused the Little Ice Age? Answer - we don't know. Did whatever caused them go away? Highly unlikely. So, which way are the underlying non-anthropogenic trends going? Beats me, but if you don't know that, how can you add or subtract their effect from the measurable change over the last century or two? You can't. If we had two or three millennia of date to work with, covering at least some of the smaller cycles, we could. But we don't have that data! All we have is 50 years of highly detail data, 350 years of less and less detailed data, and extremely limited, second hand data going back a few millennia. And I say for the record, that's not enough to have any sort of solid science out of, in a subject where you can't run a separate experiment on, over and over to get more data...

We have ice core samples go back at least 120,000 years. Hardly second hand data.

More from National Geographic.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by Angst

We have ice core samples go back at least 120,000 years. Hardly second hand data.

More from National Geographic.

What do ice cores show? O2/CO2 levels, pollen (but no way to be certain where the pollen came from, dust (the same), isotope changes, and level of precipitation at that location. Maybe SO2 spikes. That's all.

No direct solar activity measures, (sunspots, solar storms hitting the earth).
No average cloud cover data.
No direct measure of temperature, either local or as a world wide pattern.
No world-wide rainfall patterns.

These are the detailed data that are needed to be able to limit the background variances (which are large) to say how much of the temperature rise in the last century is due to extra CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere.

[Dulin's Books]

Peer Reviewed Journal Article


http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/200...JD011637.shtml

"The surge in global temperatures since 1977 can be attributed to a 1976 climate shift in the Pacific Ocean that made warming El Niño conditions more likely than they were over the previous 30 years and cooling La Niña conditions less likely" says corresponding author de Freitas.

"We have shown that internal global climate-system variability accounts for at least 80% of the observed global climate variation over the past half-century. It may even be more if the period of influence of major volcanoes can be more clearly identified and the corresponding data excluded from the analysis.”

As for glaciers melting

http://moef.nic.in/downloads/public-...per%20_him.pdf

The report says, the Siachen glacier advanced by about 700 meters between 1862 and 1909, retreated rapidly by about 400 meters between 1929 and 1958, and has shown "hardly any retreat during the last 50 years, the report said. The Gangotri glacier, which had been retreating rapidly along the front at about 20 meters per year until 2000, "has has since slowed down considerably, and between September 2007 and June 2009 is practically at a standstill. The same is true of the Bhagirathkharak and Zemu glaciers."

Thus, the report said, "It is premature to make a statement that glaciers in the Himalayas are retreating abnormally because of the global warming. A glacier is affected by a range of physical features and a complex interplay of climatic factors. It is therefore unlikely that the snout [the leading edge of a glacier] movement of any glacier can be claimed to be a result of periodic climate variation until many centuries of observations become available. While glacier movements are primarily due to climate and snowfall, snout movements appear to be peculiar to each particular glacier."

India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests has released a comprehensive report on the Himalayan glaciers by the eminent Dr. V.K. Raina, ex-Deputy Director of the Geological Survey of India. According to his report, the Saichen glacier has “not shown any remarkable retreat in the last 50 years.” In fact, it is growing. Even Richard Armstrong, Senior Research Scientist at the University of Colorado, and the man who briefed Al Gore on glaciers, concluded there was no major melting in Himalayan glaciers above 5,400 meters.

[Dulin's Books]

Originally Posted by kennyc

That's the way science works.

That is the way it is supposed to work. What you seem to be missing is that theses scientists have not been playing the same game.

They have(according to their own writings and the data uncovered with the leak) altered their data, altered their conclusions, colluded in reviewing each other's work when its supposed to be "anonymous/double blind" peer review, colluded to be the "anonymous peers" who reviewed work by others that didnt support theirs so they could squash it, edited dissenting opinions in the IPCC report to give them less weight, attempted to intimidate the Journals themselves to keep a lid on dissenting work, taken money for work they never did and destroyed data/emails and made other plans and schemes trying to avoid FOI requests.

They have subverted the whole process of peer review for their own ends and all of their work and that of others who used their data and their models is now properly in dustbin where it belongs. That includes the IPCC reports.

[pshrynk]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

This here dumb reneck would like y'all to explain the following things

Why things were so warm around 1000ad? Nobody was creating extra greenhouse gases then.

There are things about the climate of the world that are not known, yet. Likely, there was a source of CO2 or methane somewhere that got released, or the Earth's orbit was wobbling close to the sun in conjunction with the summer season in the northern hemisphere.

Why did the Maunders Minimum correlate with the Little Ice Age?

The hypothesis on that is that the albedo of the planet went way up and there was a subsequent cooling of the polar caps, leading to an ice age. Not provable until then next occurence.

We have had 4 Ice Ages in the last 2 million years, with big warm-ups in between. Could somebody explain why the wild cycles, and why the current period is different?

It is here that the current hypothesis of global warming has it's biggest problem. We really don't know if the current climate fluctuation is due to the CO2 content, but there is a lot of evidence that is pointing that direction. Back when I was taking my planetary science courses in the 70's there was a concern that we might be headed into a new ice age.

The irrefutable fact is that there is climate change occuring right now. The cause may very well be due to CO2 emissions. If not entirely, then certainly in part. The case that scientists are trying to make is that there is aneed to achieve a balance between econmics and environment, if for no other reason than to not accelerate the climate change that is already happening.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Dulin's Books

That is the way it is supposed to work. What you seem to be missing is that theses scientists have not been playing the same game.

They have(according to their own writings and the data uncovered with the leak) altered their data, altered their conclusions, colluded in reviewing each other's work when its supposed to be "anonymous/double blind" peer review, colluded to be the "anonymous peers" who reviewed work by others that didnt support theirs so they could squash it, edited dissenting opinions in the IPCC report to give them less weight, attempted to intimidate the Journals themselves to keep a lid on dissenting work, taken money for work they never did and destroyed data/emails and made other plans and schemes trying to avoid FOI requests.

They have subverted the whole process of peer review for their own ends and all of their work and that of others who used their data and their models is now properly in dustbin where it belongs. That includes the IPCC reports.

I assume you are including ALL climate scientists and ALL journals in your assertion.

I don't believe it for a second.

If (like Ralph) you have proof of this then please take it to the journals the respectable climate scientists. It will be fixed.

Here's another thing that people seem to forget.

Is science perfect? are the people conducting science perfect?
<sarcasm answer>No they're just forgiven.</sarcasm answer>

No. Neither science or scientists are perfect but the scientific method IS. If there is deception or cheating it will be revealed. That is the whole point of repeatability and replicablity of experiments.

[Bilbo1967]

Originally Posted by kennyc

No. Neither science or scientists are perfect but the scientific method IS. If there is deception or cheating it will be revealed. That is the whole point of repeatability and replicablity of experiments.

Given that global warming caused by human beings would be something that took hundreds of years, if not millenia, to manifest itself, what repeatable and replicable experiments that would prove it have scientists been able to carry out?

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Bilbo1967

Given that global warming caused by human beings would be something that took hundreds of years, if not millenia, to manifest itself, what repeatable and replicable experiments that would prove it have scientists been able to carry out?

I think you need to ask the scientists that published the studies that.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by pshrynk

There are things about the climate of the world that are not known, yet. Likely, there was a source of CO2 or methane somewhere that got released, or the Earth's orbit was wobbling close to the sun in conjunction with the summer season in the northern hemisphere.


The hypothesis on that is that the albedo of the planet went way up and there was a subsequent cooling of the polar caps, leading to an ice age. Not provable until then next occurence.


It is here that the current hypothesis of global warming has it's biggest problem. We really don't know if the current climate fluctuation is due to the CO2 content, but there is a lot of evidence that is pointing that direction. Back when I was taking my planetary science courses in the 70's there was a concern that we might be headed into a new ice age.

The irrefutable fact is that there is climate change occuring right now. The cause may very well be due to CO2 emissions. If not entirely, then certainly in part. The case that scientists are trying to make is that there is aneed to achieve a balance between econmics and environment, if for no other reason than to not accelerate the climate change that is already happening.

My point is that there have been climate changes, both up and down, both on the small scale (last 1000 years or so) and the big scale (last 3 million years or so). Only in the last 250 years could any of it be attributed to Man.

Currently, the trend is up. It may or may not be attributable to Man. Or a portion may be. But it's not an irrefutable is, and I feel that the irrefutability is no longer science, but faith. And I don't believe the lives and economic well-being of billions of lives should be controlled by somebody else's faith (or socio-politican agenda, take your pick).

All I've done is point out the limited facts, the limited timeline those facts have been gathered in (as opposed to the scale these things work in), to point out you don't have any certainties to work with. Frankly, I'm being a heck of a lot more scientific than the proponents in this thread.

But even if they are right, technology is steadily moving towards permanent fixes to the problem anyway, almost certainly in the next 50 years (possibly in the next 20). Why the screaming rush to disrupt the world's economy when the cavalry is coming anyways? Unless the goal is to disrupt the world's economy, and global warming is just an excuse.

Paranoid? Anybody remember the 1970's "We're running out of resources, Civilization will collapse before 2000 A.D."? And the Julius Simon bets? It was those mean, capitalist <blank>ers who turned out right.

[pshrynk]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

My point is that there have been climate changes, both up and down, both on the small scale (last 1000 years or so) and the big scale (last 3 million years or so). Only in the last 250 years could any of it be attributed to Man.

Currently, the trend is up. It may or may not be attributable to Man. Or a portion may be. But it's not an irrefutable is, and I feel that the irrefutability is no longer science, but faith. And I don't believe the lives and economic well-being of billions of lives should be controlled by somebody else's faith (or socio-politican agenda, take your pick).

All I've done is point out the limited facts, the limited timeline those facts have been gathered in (as opposed to the scale these things work in), to point out you don't have any certainties to work with. Frankly, I'm being a heck of a lot more scientific than the proponents in this thread.

But even if they are right, technology is steadily moving towards permanent fixes to the problem anyway, almost certainly in the next 50 years (possibly in the next 20). Why the screaming rush to disrupt the world's economy when the cavalry is coming anyways? Unless the goal is to disrupt the world's economy, and global warming is just an excuse.

Paranoid? Anybody remember the 1970's "We're running out of resources, Civilization will collapse before 2000 A.D."? And the Julius Simon bets? It was those mean, capitalist <blank>ers who turned out right.

Yeah, I'm not terribly off your mark, there. What I want to see happen is an acceleration of the technologies that you mentioned that will be decreasing the carbon impact and as much of a scale back as we can afford. The line of affordability is where the debate should be, in my opinion. And there is one thing that many of the folks on my side-ish of the equation miss, I feel. The advancement of society to a higher tech level has to date required a fairly heavy industrial base to get there. To restrict China and India in their carbon footprint will, in fact lead to more rather than less carbon usage due to being stuck in a lower tech level. It is such a hugely complex problem.

[Icarusbop]

Originally Posted by Angst

We have ice core samples go back at least 120,000 years. Hardly second hand data.

More from National Geographic.

But some ice cores have clearly indcated that CO2 went up AFTER the global temperature,possibly indicating that CO2 is a result, not a cause of global warming .

There is also something about CO2 not being able to store enoguh heat/energy compared to water vapor, making water vapor a lot more ipmortant in the grand scale of things than CO2 is, but I cannot remember the details.

But for some reason this info is not shouted from the rooftops longside the other 'data' they spout.